If you’d like to give (or get) a signed copy of Tubes, I’d like to sign it! Order from my neighbors at Greenlight Bookstore and specify what you’d like inscribed in the “special instructions” box, and I’ll swing by and write it. Free shipping in the USA. Buy here.

I’m pleased to announce the paperback publication of TUBES in the United Kingdom. It’s got a great new cover, a snazzy pocket size, and a friendly penguin on the spine. It’s a beauty. And you’ll be seeing it a lot. W.H. Smiths Travel shops will be featuring TUBES, a perfect setting for the great cover quote from The Independent:

Utterly engrossing. The year’s most stimulating and original ‘travel’ book.

Ingeniously beguiling…Blum is a smart, imaginative, evocative writer who embraces the task of making his readers feel the wonder represented by these unprepossessing object.

The paperbacks join a growing list of international editions, with translations out or forthcoming in Germany, Japan, Spain, Latin America, China, Taiwan, Brazil, Russia, Turkey and the Czech Republic! A few of those covers are below.

If you’d like to give TUBES for the holidays, I’d like to sign it! Order from my neighbors at Greenlight Bookstore and specify what you’d like inscribed in the “special instructions” box, and I’ll swing by and write it. Free shipping in the USA. Buy here.

A running list of favorite reviews of “Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet,” aka (in the UK) “Tubes: Behind the Scenes at the Internet.”

“[This] quixotic and winning book is an attempt to comprehend the physical realities of the Internet, to describe how this seemingly intangible thing is actually constructed…Valuable, comic…[Blum has] a knack for bundling packets of data into memorable observations. What makes Tubes more than an unusual sort of travel book, is [Blum’s] sense of moral curiosity.” – Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“Ingeniously beguiling. . . . Blum is a smart, imaginative, evocative writer who embraces the task of making his readers feel the wonder represented by these unprepossessing objects.” - Laura Miller, Salon

“An engaging reminder that, cyber-Utopianism aside, the internet is as much a thing of flesh and steel as any industrial-age lumber mill or factory. It is also an excellent introduction to the nuts and bolts of how exactly it all works.” - The Economist

“Engaging. . . . Full of memorable images that make the internet’s complex architecture easier to comprehend. . . . Blum leaves readers pondering questions that would not have occurred to them before and better informed about an innovation most of us take for granted.” - Iain Morris, The Guardian

“Tubes is an absorbing tale of this new technology, as well as a wonderful account of the Internet’s growth and the people who made it possible.” – Sid Perkins, Science News

“Tubes is far more than a technical anatomy, revealing instead the broader implications of this seemingly ubiquitous parallel world that two billion of us inhabit, in one form or another, on any given day.” – Brain Pickings